Ear Talk project enables people from remote locations to collaboratively share, shape, and form music through an interactive score. The Ear Talk system incorporates YouTube Live platform as a playground for people to showcase their sounds and interact with them through the YouTube comment. For example, you can comment “Hey Ear Talk, please make sample1 louder by 60%!” Through this type of interaction, we challenge viewers to amalgamate sounds of different origins into one coherent piece.

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The idea was inspired by our desire to share photos and videos on social media. However, by limiting the shareable content to merely sound, this project challenges participants to pay closer attention to the sonic qualities of our environment. The Max/Jitter hosted program “misuses” the Google ecosystem in order to collect audio files as they are shared on Google Drive, organize them into a visual score that is then live streamed on YouTube, and facilitate participants’ interactions with the score through the YouTube comment section via Google API. 

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We also wanted to explore social media as a place where people can come together and make a cohesive something, instead of becoming a dumping ground for self-obsessed thoughts and selfies. We wanted to challenge social media by transforming their content that are often oblivious to one another into a meaningful whole. And what better way to do this than through music. By limiting the sharable content to only sound, Ear Talk also directs our attention towards the sonic features of our lives, which at times is very calming in today’s noise-full world.